1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods for organizing and browsing images, and more particularly, to a method of browsing photos based on people.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Digital photography has revolutionized both professional and consumer photography. Elimination of physical film in digital cameras makes photography more cost effective by reducing film and photo development costs. Further, hundreds or thousands of digital images captured by the digital camera may be stored in a single flash memory card, such as a CompactFlash (CF) card, a Secure Digital (SD) card, or a Memory Stick (MS) device. Thus, digital photography has increased the number of people taking digital pictures, and also increased the number of pictures taken by each person, leading to a massive increase in the number of digital images generated by users.
One problem presented by the number of digital images being generated is organization of the images in a way that allows a user to find a particular photo rapidly. Typically, the user must spend minutes to find the photo, or may not be able to find the photo at all. At best, the user may be able to sort the photos by date, or by tag if the user has manually entered tags for each photo. However, if the user does not know the date the photo was taken on, or if the user has not tagged the photo, these methods may not lead to the user successfully finding the photo. Clearly, the interfaces and organizing/browsing methods utilized for finding digital images in computing systems are not intuitive, and require tremendous effort on the part of users.